Frederick Townsend Ward

GO TO MASTER INDEX OF WARFARE 1 “WAH” THE MERCENARY OF SALEM MA 1831 November 29, Tuesday: Frederick Townsend Ward was born near the docks of Salem, Massachusetts (since most of his correspondence has been destroyed by a relative, we know very little about the earlier portions of this short life). In Providence, Rhode Island, Friend Stephen Wanton Gould wrote in his journal: 3rd day 29 of 11 M 1831 / Our sub committee Meeting was held - it was a pleasant time, & the buisness conducted harmoniously. — RELIGIOUS SOCIETY OF FRIENDS 1. Face retouched to conceal battle wounds. HDT WHAT? INDEX FREDERICK TOWNSEND WARD “WAH,” THE MERCENARY GO TO MASTER INDEX OF WARFARE 1846 Winter: Frederick Townsend Ward, unsuccessful in obtaining an appointment to West Point, had attempted to enlist in the US Army to go on its attack against Mexico. Therefore upon reaching the age of 15, his father allowed the recalcitrant youth to ship out for China as a 2d mate on the clipper Hamilton, the captain of which was a relative. 1847 Fall: Frederick Townsend Ward returned from China and, for a time, studied at a military academy in Vermont. Hung Hsiu Ch’üan , while on his way to meet with followers in Kwangsi, passed a “Nine Demons Temple” and on its wall inscribed a poem to the effect that he had been sent by God to drive away such imps. 1849 At the age of 17 or 18, Frederick Townsend Ward again signed ship’s papers, this time as a 1st mate. (He would later boast of having been during the ensuing decade a Texas Ranger, and a Californian gold-miner, and an instructor in the Mexican military service, and an officer in the French army of the Crimea. He would also claim to have gone filibustering with William Walker, perhaps the expedition to Sonora, Mexico in 1853 or the expedition to Nicaragua in 1857, and confess that for this he had been outlawed by his own government. There is no record to substantiate any of this, and it has been noticed that he liked to impress people and display his manliness, and that in his retelling of it a good story would never suffer.) WILLIAM WALKER “WAH” WARD 2 Copyright 2013 Austin Meredith HDT WHAT? INDEX FREDERICK TOWNSEND WARD “WAH,” THE MERCENARY GO TO MASTER INDEX OF WARFARE 1858 Frederick Townsend Ward returned from wherever he had been at sea and from whatever he had been doing on land for the previous ten years (he had had some adventures, he could tell you), to a desk job as a ship broker working for his father in New-York. (He would find this altogether too dull and would sail again for China.) John Landis Mason of New-York patented a reusable glass jar (which would become known as the Mason Jar). Invention of the Mason jar would stimulate use of large quantities of white sugar for preserves, reducing traditional reliance on maple sugar and molasses for home cooking. Usage of white sugar in the United States would double between 1880 (when the tariff on imported sugar was lowered) and 1915. 1859 Fall: Frederick Townsend Ward disembarked in Shanghai on the coast of China and was hired as a mate on a vessel that was steaming up and down the Yangtze River. In his imagination at the time, he would be supporting the activities of local Chinese who had become Christians. Here is an excerpt from Chapter 3 “Ward and Gordon: Glorious Days of Looting” in Jonathan D. Spence’s TO CHANGE CHINA, WESTERN ADVISERS IN CHINA, 1620- 1960 (pages 57-92; London: Penguin, 1969): The China he happened upon was a country in chaos, ravaged by a great rebellion whose leaders called themselves Taipings. These leaders had developed their power in the southern provinces of Kwangtung and Kwangsi in the late 1840s, drawing recruits from Hakka and Miao minority groups, from secret societies, from pirates driven inland by British patrol vessels jealously guarding the new treaty ports, from impoverished miners and peasants, and from the drifting population on the waterways, unemployed now that the focus of the opium trade had swung from Canton up to Shanghai and the Yangtze valley. The apathy and ineffectualness of the local Ch’ing officials bad given the rebel band the opportunity to grow to some thirty thousand men by 1850. Two years later the rebels struck north, gathering hundreds of thousands of recruits along the way. In 1853, after a series of shattering victories, they seized the great city of Nanking and even threatened Peking itself. At the time of Ward’s arrival in Shanghai they were still firmly entrenched in the Yangtze valley, and had routed all the Ch’ing forces sent against them. As rebels, they were a new phenomenon in Chinese history, unlike the peasant rebel armies of the past. Their leader, Hung Hsiu-ch’üan, had gleaned the elements of Christianity from a Protestant missionary pamphlet and had learned in a mystical vision that he was the younger brother of Jesus Christ. His mission, he believed, was to establish the “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project 3 HDT WHAT? INDEX FREDERICK TOWNSEND WARD “WAH,” THE MERCENARY GO TO MASTER INDEX OF WARFARE “Heavenly Kingdom of Great Peace” (T’ai-p’ing t’ien-kuo) in China and bring his people back to knowledge of the true God. “My hand now holds both in heaven and earth the power to punish and kill,” he wrote; “to slay the depraved, and spare the upright; to relieve the people’s distress. My eyes survey from the North to the South beyond the rivers and mountains; my voice is heard from East to West, to the tracts of the sun and the moon.” Hung’s troops followed him with fanatical loyalty and were subject to iron discipline. As they advanced across the country all those who resisted were slaughtered, those who surrendered were spared. Hung’s followers had to obey the dictates of his religion, which were adapted from the Ten Commandments. The sexes were segregated, opium smoking was forbidden. Land was shared and all surplus paid into a common treasury. Civil service examinations were instituted, based, not on the Confucian canon, but on the new doctrines. Western observers, initially fascinated by these rebels and sympathetic to their Christian aspirations, felt it would be no misfortune if the Taipings overthrew the Ch’ing dynasty. A British Protestant in 1853 pointed out four “advantages which will accrue to China from success on the side of the insurgents”: China would be opened to the dissemination of the scriptures, idolatry would be firmly put down, opium traffic would be stopped, and “China, will be fully opened to our commerce, our science, our curiosity, and all the influences of our civilizations.” A Catholic missionary, though finding the Taiping religion “a compilation of doctrinal rhapsodies, rather than the adoption of a religion transmitted by others,” still saw the rebels “as avengers of their nationality” and noted “that they treated me with respect.” And these sentiments were generally echoed at home. Marx and Engels in articles they sent to the New York Daily Tribune from London wrote, “In short, instead of moralizing on the horrible atrocities of the Chinese, as the chivalrous British Press does, we had better recognize that this is a war pro aris et focis [for faith and hearth], a popular war for the maintenance of Chinese nationality, with all its overbearing prejudice, stupidity, learned ignorance, and pedantic barbarism if you like, but yet a popular war.” Desperate to contain the Taipings, the Ch’ing dynasty reluctantly condoned the development of regional armies. These armies were controlled and led by powerful officials in central China; the soldiers were usually peasants, with strong local allegiances, owing loyalty only to their own commanders. Unlike the regular Manchu forces, they were well trained and even well paid as their commanders collected the traditional land taxes and instituted new taxes on commerce, bypassing the national government treasury. Simply to preserve itself, the Ch’ing dynasty had had to delegate enormous powers to these officials. Nor was this the only trouble confronting the Court; other rebellions broke out in the north and West Of China; while at 4 Copyright 2013 Austin Meredith HDT WHAT? INDEX FREDERICK TOWNSEND WARD “WAH,” THE MERCENARY GO TO MASTER INDEX OF WARFARE the same time the Western powers were brusquely demanding first implementation and then expansion of the terms of the Treaty of Nanking. China’s intransigence in this regard precipitated the second Anglo-Chinese War in the late 1850s, and in 1860 after a British representative had been imprisoned and some of his entourage killed, allied forces occupied Peking. On the orders of Lord Elgin, the great Summer Palace of the Manchus, parts of which had been designed in the eighteenth century by Jesuits, was burned to the ground; the Emperor fled. It seemed that the Ch’ing dynasty, wracked by domestic rebellions and invaded by the West, would surely fall. ...[T]he Western powers were “adventurers.” They had arrived by sea and settled, by means of guile and coercion, onto the Chinese coast. Moreover, their diplomatic and military representatives had great freedom of action since it took so long for them to request or receive instructions from their home governments. Often they were out to get what they could for themselves or their own countries by any means possible, and accordingly their loyalties went not to the Ch’ing dynasty but to whatever groups in China best promised to forward their interests.

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